Removing United Kingdom next to a generic TLD
-
We have a generic top level domain (gTLD) called www.xyz.com which was set to target United Kingdom in Google Webmaster Tools. We have now launched a US version of the site targeting US consumers – www.xyz.com/us and set the geographic target to United States on GWT.
When I search for xyz on www.google.com, the serps brings up the .com site with “United Kingdom” beside it. This will most likely confuse our prospects as they would think we only have a UK operation. How can I tell Google not to include “United Kindgom” next to www.xyz.com
Any thoughts?
Since this was happening, I removed the geographic location target for www.xyz.com to null on GWT. Would that help solve the issue?
Look forward to your reply. Many Thanks
Jay
-
Hi Jay,
if it is possible, it would be of great help if you could tell us the domain name of the site, because without giving a look to its code is quite hard to find an answer.
The same is valid for you, Yellabird. In your case, then, I would really suggest you to open a new question thread in the Q&A, in order to not mix both cases, even though they apparently are very similar.
Thanks
-
I have a client with the exact same problem. They are using a .com and only do business in the US. They've never done business internationally, yet "United Kingdom" shows up next to their domain in SERPS just like this:
Title Tags | More Title Tags
www.companyx.com - <cite>United Kingdom</cite>
Meta Description..................................................................
What is causing this?
-
Hi John,
Many Thanks for the comments. Really appreciate it. The content on both the sites is unique so we don't need to really worry about duplicate issues. But the links you pointed out are of great help.
So when I search for xyz on www.google.com, the results page shows the www.xyz.com and next to that it mentions United Kingdom. I wanted to know how we can get rid of the United Kingdom.
Thanks for your help
Jay
-
Removing the geotargeting for www.xyz.com sounds like a good first step. I'd watch like a hawk though to see if you see any loss of impressions or rank on google.co.uk searches. When you say that "United Kingdom" appears next to it in the SERPs, where does that display?
How much duplicate content is there between the UK and US versions of your site? If you have duplicate content, Google recently announced support for rel=alternate tags: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html. This can be used to help have only one version of each page appear in a SERP. What you'd do it select a canonical version of the page across duplicate (or near duplicate) versions, and then set the alternate pages. Google will show the canonical versions title and description in the SERPs, but will show the country specific display URL based on the users geolocation. I'm still working on getting these up and running on my site.
Also, for Bing and other search engines, you might want to take a look at http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx. This gives instructions for how to tell bots which language and country each page is specific to.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Geo-Targeting separate TLD's where both are .com domains
Hi I have a client who owns two separate TLDs for the same brand (for the sake of this post, we'll call the two sites www.site-a.com and www.site-b.com). For site www.site-a.com the website has been around for a while and is their primary site for their US operations which is their heartland, is well established in the SERPS and is where they make most of their money. As they looked to expand to the UK, they then created www.site-b.com and added the UK as a subfolder (so www.site-b.com/uk) and geo-targeted it towards the UK in Webmaster tools . The site has recently launched but they now find that, when a customer searches for their brand in the UK, they find www.site-a.com in position 1 (which, given it's tailored for a primary US audience, has a significantly lower conversion rate for UK traffic) and www.site-b.com in position 2. However, the client doesn't want to specifically geo target www.site-a.com to the USA as they feel it might affect where they appear for other international markets aside from the UK. So the question is, how can they, with the existing infrastructure, help remove www.site-a.com from the UK SERPs without adversely affecting their rank elsewhere? Hope this makes sense and thanks in advance for your help. James
International SEO | | jimmygs19820 -
If domain mapping subfolders to TLD's is it perceived as a fully separate entity/site therafter ?
Hi I take it once you have domain mapped a country specific subfolder to a country specific TLD (for better local region targeting reasons) Google perceives it as a completely separate entity and it no longer shares any of the parent sites domain benefits (such as domain authority etc) so from that point on requires its own dedicated link building etc ? All Best Dan
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
International TLD Differentiation Concerns
Currently working on a project where the TLD of the parent company site is a .COM and the U.S. subsidiary is a .US. This is a first for me. What I do know. Both sites must be live Parent (.COM) targets essentially the entire international market US Subsidiary (.US) targets United States only Concerns are even with non-duplicate content will there be confusion there with the closely related domain, just a TLD change? Any suggestions are greatly, greatly appreciated!
International SEO | | dodgejd0 -
How to handle rel canonical on secondary TLD's - multi regional sites.
I currently have a .com domain which I am think of duplicating the content on to another tld, CO.UK (and regionalize some aspects like contact numbers etc). From my research, it seems that in gwt you must then indicate which country you wish to target, in the co.uk case the UK. My question is how should I handle rel canonical in the duplicated site. should it rel canonical back to the .com or the co.uk? Any other pointers would also be appreciated. Thx
International SEO | | dmccarthy0 -
Anyone have experience using .asia TLD?
We are the top US supplier of a very high end French made product. The largest market for their products is Japan. We would like to target Japanese buyers that travel (for business or pleasure) to the West Coast (we're in SF) for personalized US delivery. I have been reading all related SEOmoz posts for International SEO. But looking to the future there could be other Asian opportunities, so a .asia domain has appeal (as does the $6 per year cost vs. $99 for a .jp). Is this TLD credible (both to potential customers and Yahoo Japan)? THX
International SEO | | Chasmo1 -
Migration from tld's to .com sub folders
Hi Guys, We currently operate five websites, 1 on .co.uk, 1 on .co.nz, 1 on .de and 1 on .com (geo targeted to USA) and 1 on .com/au (targeted at Australia). Open Site Explorer currently credits our .co.uk with 212 unique domains linking to us, our .com has 130, our .co.nz has 110 and our .de (which is new) has around 10. We have a website on .com/au targeting Australia and we have gained around 30 - 40 links into this sub folder. Our rankings in google australia for this website are fantastic and it would appear to me that we have inherited all the domain authority of our .com. The UK is currently our most important market and we operate a website on a .co.uk there. Our main competitors there have around 300 - 400 unique domains linking to them. What I am thinking of doing is deploying our UK content onto our .com root domain (which is currently geo targeted at the US which is a really small market for us) and redirecting all of the .co.uk pages at the root folder of the .com and changing the geo targeting of the .com to the UK. Additionally I was going to migrate our .co.nz and our .de websites into .com/nz/ and .com/de/ sub folders. I will also create a new .com/us/ folder for the US. I can only go off the fact that the only sub folder website we have (.com/au) has been very successful for us. Do you think migration of all of these websites onto the .com domain using sub folders will provide a meaningful boost to our rankings by virtue of having more back links into one domain? Are there any big risks in doing so and how long would you expect the redirects and changes to be picked up by google. I really appreciate any help and comments on this. Kind Regards
International SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0 -
What’s the best way to convert ccTLD to global TLD?
We started out as a Canadian site targeting Canadian users. Now our site http://iCraft.ca has a lot of international buyers and sellers and .ca TLD doesn’t make sense anymore, as we are not performing well on Google.com We are doing a complete site redesign right now, which will address a lot of coding and content specific issues, but we suspect .ca domain will always hold us back in achieving good positions on Google.com. Since Google doesn’t allow ccTLDs to set geo-targeting, what are our options? a) Migrating to a brand new .com site and setting up 301 redirects for all links from iCraft.ca. Would we lose all rankings in this example and pretty much start building them from scratch? Or would PR be transferred page by page from one domain to another through 301 redirects? b) Setup a separate .com site with mirrored content to target global audience and keep .ca site to target Canada. Not sure if splitting PR for the same pages between 2 sites is a good idea. Also, how would you address duplicate content properly in our situation?
International SEO | | MarinaUX
In this video that I found here on forum http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo Matt Cutts says that it’s ok to have duplicate content on different ccTLDs, but he says - make sure you localize your content on those domains. What if you can’t? Most of the content on our site is meant for anyone, not just Canadian users. So, for the most part, we’d have exactly same content on .com site, as we have on .ca site. We could display prices in different currencies on product pages, but the rest of the content – blogs, forum etc. are not country-specific and can’t be localized easily. Also, it’s not clear from the video if all mirrored sites should sit on the same domain name for each country, like example.com and example.ca or is it ok to have example.com and icraft.ca? c) Is there a better option? Thanks for your help!0 -
Multi-lingual SEO: Country-specific TLD's, or migration to a huge .com site?
Dear SEOmoz team, I’m an in-house SEO looking after a number of sites in a competitive vertical. Right now we have our core example.com site translated into over thirty different languages, with each one sitting on its own country-specific TLD (so example.de, example.jp, example.es, example.co.kr etc…). Though we’re using a template system so that changes to the .com domain propagate across all languages, over the years things have become more complex in quite a few areas. For example, the level of analytics script hacks and filters we have created in order to channel users through to each language profile is now bordering on the epic. For a number of reasons we’ve recently been discussing the cost/benefit of migrating all of these languages into the single example.com domain. On first look this would appear to simplify things greatly; however I’m nervous about what effect this would have on our organic SE traffic. All these separate sites have cumulatively received years of on/off-site work, and even if we went through the process of setting up page-for-page redirects to their new home on example.com, I would hate to lose all this hard-work (and business) if we saw our rankings tank as a result of the move. So I guess the question is, for an international business such as ours, which is the optimal site structure in the eyes of the search engines; Local sites on local TLD’s, or one mammoth site with language identifiers in the URL path (or subdomains)? Is Google still so reliant on TLD for geo targeting search results, or is it less of a factor in today’s search engine environment? Cheers!
International SEO | | linklater0